Ideology is transforming medical mindset

Kathrin Mentler sought help. Next came a distressing conversation. Photo: Source

Canadians have been embroiled in debate over another shaming case of people being offered doctor-assisted suicide rather than treatment and care expressing patient dignity. As in the "official' line in North America in the treatment of young people suffering gender confusion,  a self-interested clique can be identified as promoting a convenient and fashionable ideology of non-care.   

The Globe and Mail reports on an interview with a suicidal patient whose struggle seems to epitomises the abandonment under ideological pressure of health workers' most basic goal: do no harm. The Canadian health service's Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) programme has given rise to a national outcry. The report states:

Kathrin Mentler, 37, lives with chronic depression and suicidality, both of which she says were exacerbated by a traumatic event early this year. Feeling particularly vulnerable in June, she went to Vancouver General Hospital looking for psychiatric help in dealing with feelings of hopelessness she feared she couldn’t shake. 

Instead, Ms. Mentler says a clinician told her there would be long waits to see a psychiatrist and that the health care system is “broken.” That was followed by a jarring question: “Have you considered MAID?”

“I very specifically went there that day because I didn’t want to get into a situation where I would think about taking an overdose of medication,” Ms. Mentler, a first-year counselling student, told The Globe and Mail in an interview.

“The more I think about it, I think it brings up more and more ethical and moral questions around it.”

Vancouver Coastal Health, which operates the hospital, confirmed that the discussion took place but said the topic of MAID was brought up to gauge Ms. Mentler’s risk of suicidality.

Criticism arises over growing list of neglect

MAID is not currently legal for mental illness alone. Canada legalized assisted dying in 2016 for patients with “reasonably forseeable” deaths and expanded eligibility in 2021 to those with incurable conditions who were suffering intolerably. The legislation was set to expand again in March to allow MAID for those with mental illness as a sole condition, but the federal government sought a one-year pause to allow for further study.

The issue has divided doctors, researchers and mental health advocates who have taken sides in a contentious debate that is ultimately about patient autonomy versus patient protection.

Publicized cases have fuelled criticisms that the life-ending procedure is being offered in lieu of sufficient mental health and social supports. In April, 2022, CTV News reported that a 51-year-old Ontario woman with severe sensitivities to chemicals chose MAID after failing to find affordable housing free of cigarette smoke and chemical cleaners. And last August, Global News reported that a Canadian Forces veteran seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury was unexpectedly offered MAID by a Veterans Affairs Canada employee. 

Clinician's comment added to the distress

When Ms. Mentler presented to Vancouver General Hospital’s Access and Assessment Centre in June, she wanted psychiatric help and was prepared to stay overnight if needed. The centre offers mental health and substance use services, including crisis intervention, according to a web page about its services.

After filling out an intake form, she was taken to a smaller room where she shared her feelings and mental health history with a clinician. Day-to-day life was feeling overwhelming and she worried about her persistent feelings of depression, she recalled telling the clinician.

“She was like, ‘I can call the on-call psychiatrist, but there are no beds; there’s no availability,’ ” Ms. Mentler said. “She said to me: ‘The system is broken.’ ”

But it was the clinician’s next comments Ms. Mentler found particularly distressing.

“She said, ‘Have you ever considered MAID?’ ” Ms. Mentler said, adding that she was so bewildered by the question that she didn’t initially understand what the clinician meant. “I thought, like a maid that cleans a room?”

Ms. Mentler had not considered MAID before, but told the clinician of her past attempts to end her life by overdosing on medication. She said the clinician replied that such a method could result in brain damage and other harms, and that MAID would be a more “comfortable” process during which she would be given sedating benzodiazepines among other drugs. 

The counselling student says she left the centre soon after, not wanting to think about the encounter. The next day, she says she awoke wanting to scream and cry, and posted about the exchange on a private social media account to a group of friends who echoed how troubling they found it to be.

How can this be standard procedure?

As to the hospital service's reason given for the conversation about suicide:

Ms. Mentler is unconvinced.

“Gauging suicide [risk] should not include offering options to die, which is what it felt like,” she said. “I also think it’s worth considering that, as of right now, MAID for mental health is not legal yet, so giving someone the specifics of the process seems wrong. How can this be standard procedure for suicide crisis intervention?”

Jonny Morris, chief executive of the Canadian Mental Health Association’s B.C. division, said the province, like many other jurisdictions, lacks a “systematic, accepted response” for how people should approach those in suicidal crisis. 

 As in most countries where traditional social norms and ways of life have been disrrupted by an individualistic and nihilistic mindset, Canadians suffer from mental illness in increasing numbers. Some statistics: 

💢More than 6.7 million Canadians, that is, one in two Canadians have—or have had—a mental illness by the time they reach 40 years of age. 

💢Opioid overdoses now account for more deaths in Canada than automobile accidents.

💢Over 4,000 Canadians die by suicide every year—an average of 11 per day.

The increasing health expenditure as Canadians' lifestyles are degraded by the typical Western lifestyle is often cited as a reason why the Canadian Government supports the MAID programme.

The online news outlet The Tyee reports:

These expansions [to MAID] have been met with heavy criticism from disability and mental health advocates, social workers and experts on mental illness. In 2019 then UN Special Rapporteur for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Catalina Devandas-Aguilar, said she was “extremely concerned” people with disabilities may request MAID because they couldn’t access adequate care.

Since then several people have told The Tyee and other media that they’re accessing or considering accessing MAID not because of their disability but because they’re unable to access supports to live a good life.

What is happening to Canadian medicine?

But ideology is the main reason why MAID has become a central feature of the Canadian health system, according to Scott Kim, a psychiatrist and philosopher who studies medical assistance in dying. He served on the Council of Canadian Academies Expert Panel Working Group on MAID Where a Mental Disorder is the Sole Underlying Medical Condition. Dr Kim writes:

The debate in Canada has not focused enough on why well-meaning doctors are continuing to approve and perform such outrageous cases of MAID. Aren’t doctors supposed to protect the vulnerable? Are they not guided by an ethic, a professional identity, that goes beyond the floor set by the law? What is happening to Canadian medicine?

The answer is that it has been captured by a uniquely Canadian MAID ideology. The current crisis cannot be averted without addressing this potent driver of Canadian MAID practice.

[I]t is striking that Canada’s main MAID-provider organization, the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP), has been promoting the practice of bringing up the procedure unsolicited. The organization, which received $3.3 million from the government to develop a curriculum for MAID providers, has set this out as not merely something permissible, but as a “professional obligation.”

It is difficult to overemphasize how radical this position is. 

Ideological capture in Canada is not hyperbole

Dr Kim goes deeper into the matter benefiting from his research vantage point: 

Consider the controversy over doctors and staff initiating unprompted conversations with patients about MAID. Such incidents are understandably disturbing because no one should suggest to another person – especially someone living with a disability – that their life is not worth living.  

Such unprompted initiations of MAID conversation are prohibited in the Australian state of Victoria, and in New Zealand (both jurisdictions in which the procedure is legal). One does not have to be a fan of gag rules – and, to be clear, I’m not – to see that such prohibitions are meant to draw attention to a clear boundary: Even when MAID is legal, it should be an exception to the practice of medicine, not something to be taken into its very bosom. There is a reason why all MAID laws regulate how to respond to requests, not how to promote it.

But in Canada, aided by a flawed law, a MAID ideology is transforming the way medicine views itself. To talk of ideological capture in Canada is not hyperbole.

Consider a patient who still has good (even curative) treatment options left, but who refuses them and requests MAID instead. In the Netherlands, a doctor who believes that the patient indeed has genuine options would be violating not only the law but also their professional ethic as a doctor if they sign off on MAID in such a case. Since MAID is a last-resort exception there, a Dutch doctor must exercise their professional medical judgment to determine that no medical intervention will alter the outcome for the patient.

In contrast, a Canadian doctor faced with a MAID request from a patient with a curable disease can put aside such an ethic (or, as one psychiatrist in such a situation put it in an interview with The Globe and Mail, go “against her better judgment”) and terminate the patient’s life. Why would well-meaning Canadian doctors discard their professional ethic? Why do they not feel the force of it to guide their practice?

To see why, we only need to return to the CAMAP document on bringing up MAID with patients. CAMAP repeatedly calls MAID a “treatment option” and a “care option” that is “medically effective.” This kind of Orwellian word game has chilling consequences. MAID is now a treatment option that a doctor may provide instead of even a curative option; after all, both are “medically effective” care options.

Through this ideological lens, it is easy to see why a doctor might approve MAID for even those who desperately want to live but cannot afford to. 

 Dr Kim's conclusion is this:

As we have seen, this MAID ideology – one shared by no other jurisdiction in the world – has made fact-based policy making nearly impossible in Canada. Unless its spell is broken, it is difficult to see how a further deepening of the crisis can be avoided, for no set of “safeguards” born from the ideology will be able to protect the society’s most vulnerable from the “helping hand” of medicine.

As with gender ideology's approach to distressed young people—cash flow first, patient second—so too with the unprincipled, and basically uncaring, response to the needs of sick, disabled and depressed seen in the Canadian practice of euthanasia. The official Canadian submission to an ideology that promotes low-cost solutions to an individual's life difficulties speaks volumes about the nature of that society now, and its direction for the future.

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Suffering fails as an objection to God

Boat people in 1982 after eight days at sea.

The Sky Woman of the Iroquois creation myth bore twin boys, Sapling and Flint. The first was kind and the other cruel. The hard-hearted god spent his time creating the hardships that stand in the way of humans and devising problems his twin was forced to fix. 

The Asian perspective on the universal puzzle of life's struggle might be provided by the story of the farmer who responds to the pain and distress with the query "Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?"

In a YouTube examination of human suffering, Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota taps into Catholic tradition to challenge us all to acknowledge that God's actions or permissions are beyond our capacity to understand because God is of an order than humans just cannot grasp.

Bishop Barron says:

I do a lot of debate and dialogue with non-believers. Very often when agnostics and atheists attack the faith, it’s along the lines of, “How could an all-knowing and all-good God allow"—now fill in the blank; maybe the suffering of children, or natural catastrophes, for animals to suffer the way they do, or leukemia in a five-year-old.

These are just so anomalous. “How could you possibly believe that an all-knowing, all-good God could allow these things?” Much of the objection hinges upon the puzzle that is proposed by the existence of God.

Here’s a classic answer from within the heart of our tradition. “I admit it,” Paul says, “I admit it. God’s ways are confounding to us.”

He says in Romans 11:33:

Oh, the depth of the riches

and the wisdom and the knowledge of God!

How inscrutable are his judgments

and how unsearchable his ways!

Barron continues:

So the atheist or the agnostic might say, “Well, isn’t that neat? Isn’t that an easy way out of the problem? To just say, ‘Oh, it’s a great mystery.’”

Well, not really. We have to realize whom we’re dealing with and whom we’re talking about when we deal with and talk about God. God is not something in the world.

[O]bjects and events and experiences within the world... If I use philosophical language, those are all categorical things. They can be categorized. I can say, “Oh yeah, that’s this type of thing and that’s something else. Oh yeah, that’s where that thing ends and where that thing begins.”

They are all definable, and limits to each can be identified.

I can say, “Well, yeah, that’s Jupiter, but that’s Saturn over there.” There’s that person, and here’s this person. They’re separate, they’re definable, they’re categorizable.

Then there’s God, the Creator of all things, the reason why there’s something rather than nothing. 

The explanation for the universe itself is not an ingredient in the universe. It’s not a thing among others within the universe.

Very often atheists and agnostics make that fundamental error. They think of God as some big object. “Some say it’s there, some say it’s not. Let’s go find out.” But that’s what God is not.

Therefore, God, in our great tradition, is described as being totaliter aliter. That means not just other, like Jupiter is other than Saturn. God is totaliter aliter. It means he’s “totally other.” God can’t be compared to anything within the world.

It’s not as though, “Well, here’s this thing and then there’s God over there.”  Well, then I could define God. Even that word definition —definire. Finis in Latin means a limit. To define something is to set a limit to it.

God can’t be defined. God can’t be delimited.Therefore, he can’t be contrasted with or compared with anything in the world.

Let's start reading the mystics on this

This means that God can’t be seen. Now, don’t think of that as, “Well, there’s some visible things floating around and there’s some invisible things like atoms and all that.”

No, no, God is in principle invisible. He can never come within the scope of my senses or of my mind. When I move into the reality of God, I’m going to that place—I’ll quote U2 here, but they’re relying on the mystics—where the streets have no names.

If the streets have names, I kind of know where I’m going. [...] But when you’re dealing with God, who’s not a thing in the world, you’re going into a place where the streets have no names.

That’s why there’s that great text in our mystical tradition called The Cloud of Unknowing. Think of the cloud on Mount Sinai, the cloud that signals the presence of God. It’s a cloud of unknowing. "I can’t see. I don’t know where I’m going. I can’t get my bearings.”

Oh, the depth of the riches and

wisdom and knowledge of God!

How inscrutable are his judgments

and how unsearchable his ways!

Why is God doing what God is doing? I don’t know, and that’s not a cop-out answer. You see my point?That’s the only answer I can coherently give, given the nature of God.

Now, let me take it a step further. So that’s the undefinable quality of God, but God is also a person. God’s not some dumb object or force. God is a person.

I don’t know about you, but persons are always mysterious. And I’m talking here about human persons.

[A] person always remains elusive and mysterious,because the person has got a hidden, secret identity that is apparent to you only when the person reveals it.

Isn’t it interesting that married couples—married for forty, fifty years—will say, “My husband or my wife is now more mysterious to me than he or she was before.”

That makes perfect sense to me, perfect sense that the more you delve into a human person, the stranger and more elusive and mysterious that person becomes.

Now, combine these two things. God is an infinite, undefinable person. Therefore, how inscrutable his judgments, how unsearchable his ways.

Something like a child and parents 

Stay with that last phrase for a second. Think of a little child in relation to his parents. A little three- or four-year-old. And the three- or four-year-old understands, “Oh, my parents love me, but man, do they do strange, inscrutable things. Forcing me to go to bed when I don’t want to. Telling me I can’t do this or that, and that’s the very thing I want.

But when I’m hungry for something and they tell me no, I can’t have it. They take me to this guy wearing a white coat and he sticks needles in me. I don’t know what they’re doing.”

If a child could be given the vocabulary of St.Paul, he would say vis-à-vis his parents,

“How inscrutable they are, how unsearchable their judgments. I don’t know what they’re doing. Somehow I know these two people love me, but boy do they do strange things to express it.”

Well, obviously the little kid doesn’t have the capaciousness of mind to take in what his parents understand[...] Parents get it, but the child, in principle, can’t get it.

Now, take that, and lift it to the infinite degree: the difference between our consciousness and God’s consciousness, the difference between us and this infinite, indefinable person who is God.

Is it puzzling that his judgments seem pretty strange and inscrutable to us? Sure. In fact, the more religious you are, the more you’re going to feel this.

The takeaway is this: 

Why do we think for a second that we should be able fully to understand the judgments of God? No, no, “the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.”

You say, “Okay, well then where am I left?” Where you’re left, I think where we’re all left, is in the attitude of that child vis-à-vis his or her parents: “I know these people love me. I know that at some deep, instinctual level. I don’t understand why they do everything they do, but yet I will trust. Yet I will trust.”

Now we come to the central teaching of St.Paul, which is what he calls faith. But don’t think of faith propositionally, first of all, as accepting certain propositions.

Think of faith as meaning this existential trust. I’m justified, Paul says, by faith, by this trust in God whose ways and judgments I know remain inscrutable to me.

We are relating to an infinite, indefinable person who loves us. Therefore, in him we place our trust.

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Poetry and our spiritual journey from indifference

Yes, we are the unappreciative possessors of a spiritual capacity to travel into the "invisible and unnameable regions of being" that is much, much more than employing our mental processes alone to build a mere body of cognitive knowledge.

Once again, that "information architect", Maria Popova, by investigating how poets come to understand the human condition, identifies "the truth about us” that is exhilarating. She warns of what can be described as the scab of indifference that covers the eyes and ears of our heart, an indifference engendered by submission to the sensual body, the lustful eye, pride in possessions.

SPELL AGAINST INDIFFERENCE

by Maria Popova

The rain falls and falls

cool, bottomless, and prehistoric

falls like night —

not an ablution

not a baptism

just a small reason

to remember

all we know of Heaven

to remember

we are still here

with our love songs and our wars,

our space telescopes and our table tennis.


Here too

in the wet grass

half a shell

of a robin’s egg

shimmers

blue as a newborn star

fragile as a world.

It's so true that the wonderful world around us has meaning, should we care to pause and consider who we are and the source of the gift put into our hands.

Like poetry, prayer is an instrument for paying attention. As Paul observes in his letter to the Romans:

For what can be know about God is perfectly plain since God himself has made it plain. Ever since God created the world his everlasting power and deity—however invisible—have been there for the mind to see in the things he has made [...] to see it was rational to acknowledge God.

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Still we need to ask: what is marriage?

                                                                                                                                                                  Photo Source

So, what is marriage? Does the world we live in today require a new definition from what has been handed down as part of the wisdom tradition of ages past? Are humans now somehow different from humans who came before and who lived in a myriad of cultural groupings, large and small, but who had a common insight into the symmetry of man and woman and child? 

From that rich vein of experience that is history, the Catholic Church is clear on the anthropology of the human person, even before revelation offers its confirmation. The Church's study of how to be optimally human, that is, how each person— and each society—can flourish, has come to be termed the "theology of the body". 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

The marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, has been founded and endowed with its own special laws by the Creator. By its very nature it is ordered to the good of the couple, as well as to the generation and education of children. Christ the Lord raised marriage between the baptized to the dignity of a sacrament (#1660).

Writer Leila Miller comments:

Jesus spoke about marriage as a one-flesh union that only husbands and wives can form [...] Marriage is a special kind of communion between one man and one woman that is ordered toward their mutual love and toward the procreation of children—bonding and babies. 

In 1930, Pope Pius XI wrote an encyclical on Christian marriage, Casti Connubii, which says that “the child holds the first place” as a blessing in marriage. Second is “the blessing of conjugal honor which consists in the mutual fidelity of the spouses in fulfilling the marriage contract” (19).

This understanding of marriage is not merely a “Catholic thing.” It is universal, a part of our human nature. All cultures in human history recognized, until about two seconds ago, historically speaking, that marriage is a union of man and woman ordered to children and families.

As the Catechism says: The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes (1603).

Christians are "imposing their view”

Leila Miller tackles the difficulty some people have, perhaps those who did not have an intellectually challenging experience during their higher education and continue to live in a bubble of an myopic present:

People who claim that the Church is “imposing” its view of marriage on others don’t realize that anyone who claims to define marriage for himself also “imposes” a view of marriage. For example, laws that define marriage as “the union of two adults” impose that view on polygamists and those who believe in child brides (both of which are practices that, unlike SSM, actually have historical precedent).

The only way not to impose a definition of marriage is to say that marriage is “what anyone wants it to be”—in which case it ceases to be anything at all. 

Christianity did not exist until a little over 2,000 years ago, and yet, until just 2001 when the Netherlands became the first to legalize “gay marriage,” the entire history of the pagan and non-Christian world had only known bride-and-groom marriages. 

Neither ancient cultures that approved of homosexuality nor modern atheistic regimes that are fiercely opposed to religion had or have “gay marriage.” 

Why? Because the natural-law understanding of marriage (conjugal union of bride and bridegroom, woman and man) has always been a universal human understanding. The conjugal view of marriage is the only view that explains why government has an interest in regulating marriage in the first place: because it’s the only type of union that produces a child.

This type of relationship is unique among all others, and society rightly sees the need to bind fathers to mothers formally, in order to secure and promote a stable environment in which to rear and educate children born from their union. If we are going to accept the new “relational” or “romantic” view of marriage (that marriage is solely about the love that exists between two people), then none of the remaining marital norms that almost everyone—including supporters of SSM—accepts should still apply.

When people think that marriage is simply for companionship or romantic love, they have a hard time understanding why companionship and romance between same-sex couples should not be recognized as a marriage. They also don’t understand why sex should be saved for marriage when marriage is just about a fuzzy concept of “love” rather than a one-flesh union that is ordered to result in a child.

However, when we recognize that only a man and woman can form the “one-flesh” bodily union of marriage, any relationship that lacks this element, no matter how dedicated or caring it may be, is not a marriage. 

While it's not deemed politically correct to view marriage as being for the sake of the child and for the welfare of society as a whole, the consequences of the loss of that understanding through the social upheaval that the Sexual Revolution has wrought are devastating those chained to the Western experience. See these headlines:

💢 US suicides hit all time high in 2022  

💢 Mental health emergency in UK as urgent referrals for under 18s triple

Augusto Del Noce, an Italian philosopher and political thinker, is regarded as one of the preeminent political thinkers and philosophers after World War II. He traced the dis-ease in the West to a particular cause:

Del Noce describes the sexual revolution as the essence of the “Occidentalist heresy,” the radical abolition of the sacred. After that abolition, there is no objective, cosmic order of truth to which individual behavior and social norms and institutions must conform.  

Wherever the Occidentalist heresy is introduced, the “True in itself and the Good in itself (permanent values) are denied, and thus religion, metaphysics, and morality in the traditional sense are destroyed.” Indeed, in a society secularized by Occidentalism, not only is there no longer any tradition, but “every expression (novel, show, etc.) is made meaningful only by the intensity or novelty with which it denies some traditional ­value.”

The goal is to ensure that “there is nothing that can be handed down . . . no more fatherland, or family.” Del Noce wrote these words in 1970, and since then the West has gone a long way toward vindicating his analysis. 

Consider also these words concerning the path laid to dismiss the concept of the sanctity of a marriage of a man and a woman for the sake of the child:

Like Wilhelm Reich, who popularized the term, Del Noce sees the sexual revolution as the culmination of “total revolution.” It is one face of a “new, more dangerous, and more radical form of totalitarianism” than any seen heretofore, “even though these new positions claim to represent the highest degree of democracy and anti-fascism.” Unlike previous authoritarianisms, it is not a positive political program bent on world domination, but a negative “totalitarianism of disintegration” aimed at the perpetual destruction of antecedent order.

Another writer comments on this graph:

You think a child whose life was torn apart by his parents’ divorce is going to be excited about the sexual freedom [the Boomer] generation won for themselves? Even if he accepts their moral values regarding sex and sexuality, he can’t escape knowing that there is a cost.

For the old order— in the West—the earth moved. From a study of Philip Larkin's sad, sour poem Annus Mirabilis:  

Sex, or private life, is the big deal in the new order, its distinctive creation. That is the new freedom. But while eros is a democrat, in that eroticism is no respecter of class or virtue, it is also true that eros is a master over willing slaves: Men abandon their dignity because of eros. (Source)

Ω See also: The most important philosopher you have never hear of 

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified by email when a new post is published.

Is it true that there is no truth?

The materialism that has taken hold in the Western world —which is not the whole world—has given rise to a self-contradictory skepticism, a foolishness that has become fashionable but which has within it the faultline directing its own collapse:

Is it true that there is no truth? Certain that nothing is certain? Absolutely no absolutes? A universal truth that there are no universal truths? Dogmatically given that there are no dogmas given? An objective truth that truth is not objective? Sociologically or psychologically relative that everything is sociologically or psychologically relative? A myth that all is a myth? An illusion that all is illusion?

The game takes many forms, but you can never win it. Similarly with reductionism. If love is only lust, thought only cerebral biochemistry, reasoning only rationalization, gods only myths, justice only power, choice only unperceived necessity, eternity only time’s dream, etcetera, the formula for that “nothing buttery” is that A is nothing but B, that A is only B—but that means that there is in all reality no A, or dimension of A, that is more than B. 

But you can know that only if you know all reality or all dimensions of reality. And for that, you must have total, all-encompassing intelligence; in other words, you must be God. If you do not think you are God, then welcome to the ranks of at least the open-minded agnostics, those who are not sure that there is no door in the wall, that no angel will ever greet you, etc. If you do think you are God, I thank you for not punishing me for disbelieving in you. 

You cannot justify by the scientific method the principle that everything can be reduced to the scientific method. And since that scientific reductionism is a choice, not a logical necessity, and not only a choice but a logically self-contradictory choice, what in the world is motivating you to make that choice and to live it? Why do you want to deny human dignity, freedom, and spirituality? You don’t have to. Why do you want to chop off your head? 

Ω From: Doors in the Walls of the World: Signs of Transcendence in the Human Story  by Peter Kreeft. 

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Something ugly simmering in society

Music has always been a cultural indicator.

Ted Gioia is author of The Honest Broker on Substack, a guide to music, books, media, and culture. He is author of 12 books, and has served on the faculty at Stanford. His latest piece explores why fans are throwing things at performers, knowing they might hurt them.

Gioia writes:

It’s a curious coincidence that, during this same period, activists have started throwing things at famous works of art. You wouldn’t normally think of museums and concert halls as epicenters of paintball-esque outbursts. But in the year 2023, they are hot spots for all the worst tendencies. 

Of course, there’s a long history of fans throwing things on stage. But until recently, they were usually nice things. Only in the rarest instance—for example, a vaudeville show of embarrassingly low quality—were tomatoes tossed at a performer.

His judgment as to why American and European audiences are now creatures to be wary of:

The anger isn’t coming from the music. It’s coming from the broader culture.

Of course, all of us already know that there’s a collapse in civility and decent behavior in every sphere of public life nowadays. The stuff happening on airplanes blows my mind. And it’s also happening at restaurants, movie theaters, and any other place where people congregate for work or play.

"But there are specific triggering issues related to music", Gioia says, and: 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the worst acts of pre-meditated violence during the last decade have occurred at music venues. In addition to schools and shopping centers, musical performances are frequent targets.

You may think that violence plays out on the battlefield, not at a pop concert. But music has always been a cultural indicator. In some ways, it is our most revealing source of information on society. Sometimes the future shows up in our music even before it gets covered in the newspapers.

So even if I am saddened by the craziness at music concerts, I can’t say I’m surprised There’s something ugly simmering in our society, and it has finally arrived at the pricey front row seats of concerts. All of sudden, fans have decided that an expensive ticket gives them the right to do something abusive to their favorite pop star.

It makes no sense, but it’s definitely part of the zeitgeist. And it will almost certainly get worse before it gets better.

Such is the state of mind of swathes of citizens in countries that have been captured by a progressive nihilism. And take note of this depiction that works for everyone who bears the burden of commitment only to self, the type that has become all too common:

He is a truly postmodern man: no truth exists apart from his; and any alternative reality has to be attacked mercilessly. Because his whims oscillate, so do the non-facts he invents to satisfy them. He is a spluttering, glowering fusillade of fantasies. He is, in Michael Wolff’s words, “a man whose behavior defies and undermines the structures and logic of civic life”. 

Ω See also: There will be more ugly travellers... 

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SheraSeven and Slumflower lack vision

SheraSeven during a three-hour YouTube session where she says she will never get a divorce.

It's not a pretty sight, the place where many young women are coming from. Love, for instance, is barely a secondary matter, with money certainly to the fore. On that account, Kimberley McIntosh, writing in The Guardian, retorts that young women struggling with debt and burnout need a better vision than getting a rich man to pay the bills. 

McIntosh reports:

Over the past few months, a number of straight-talking, self-help gurus for women (often described half-jokingly in the comment section as “the female Andrew Tate”) have been blowing up on TikTok. SheraSeven (real name Leticia Padua) has been attracting a large audience of young women. Despite not even having a TikTok account herself, clips that have cross-pollinated from her YouTube have racked up almost 20 billion views and counting. 

The comment sections under these TikTok videos are full of women who are fed up with modern heterosexual dating to the point that they don’t believe men have anything to offer them emotionally. SheraSeven’s advice teaches women to game patriarchy and turn their pain into power.

Shera advises women over the age of 25 to seek out and date older, affluent men and to actively play games to get them. This includes hiding your insecurities from potential partners and using reverse psychology to manipulate men, so you can imitate intimacy without the risk that comes with true vulnerability. 

SheraSeven, who is an American self-styled “financial adviser” rather than a relationship guide, and who has been making videos for about nine years, declares, according to McIntosh: 

Once they’ve locked a man down, women should push for them to pay for all of their household bills and expenses. Men without money are “dusties” and not to be entertained.

[V]eering away from the stereotype of the 1950s housewife, and its modern iteration, the tradwife, SheraSeven doesn’t suggest women must take on domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing in exchange for financial support. A man of means can hire people to help with that. You are there to look beautiful and be worshipped. This is presumably what makes her gospel so attractive.  

Slumflower (sic)

A kindred spirit is... "Slumflower (real name Chidera Eggerue), who initially implored millennial women to fight patriarchy by indulging in 'dump him feminism' via viral tweets and cute Instagram graphics that escalated into telling women to only date affluent men – and to take everything from them that they can."

Eggerue, who is British, has written several successful books on topics such as What A Time To Be Alone and How to Get Over a Boy, which the publisher proclaims as a "sensational manifesto and guide to dating men".

On dating, McIntosh states that SheraSeven "tells the audience she will never start a YouTube channel to give people advice on “real relationships” that aren’t based on money, because all relationships are ultimately based on power". McIntosh concludes:

It’s a bleak picture. So many of the ways women are being encouraged to live [... involve] a re-evaluation of our relationship to work, rest and leisure. We need a collective vision for improving our lives. Without it, women will continue looking for answers elsewhere. 

Given the bleakness in dating or married life conjured up by McIntosh's reporting, what follows is a vision that women can live by that is of a higher order than any that Leticia Padua or Chidera Eggerue seem to offer. The vision arises from the nature of marriage, and on this I quote from the source I cite at the end of this post: 

So, what is marriage? The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: The marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, has been founded and endowed with its own special laws by the Creator. By its very nature it is ordered to the good of the couple, as well as to the generation and education of children (#1660). [Also], Jesus spoke about marriage as a one-flesh union that only husbands and wives can form. 

Marriage is a special kind of communion between one man and one woman that is ordered toward their mutual love and toward the procreation of children—bonding and babies.

In 1930, Pope Pius XI wrote an encyclical on Christian marriage, Casti Connubii, which says that “the child holds the first place” as a blessing in marriage. Second is “the blessing of conjugal honor which consists in the mutual fidelity of the spouses in fulfilling the marriage contract” (#19). This understanding of marriage is not merely a “Catholic thing.” It is universal, a part of our human nature. All cultures in human history recognized, until about two seconds ago, historically speaking, that marriage is a union of man and woman ordered to children and families.

As the Catechism says: The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes (#1603).

 Everybody’s “Imposing”

People who claim that the Church is “imposing” its view of marriage on others don’t realize that anyone who claims to define marriage for himself also “imposes” a view of marriage. For example, laws that define marriage as “the union of two adults” impose that view on polygamists and those who believe in child brides (both of which are practices that, unlike same-sex marriage, actually have historical precedent). [...] In fact, the only way not to impose a definition of marriage is to say that marriage is “what anyone wants it to be”—in which case it ceases to be anything at all.

[T]he natural-law understanding of marriage (conjugal union of bride and bridegroom, woman and man) has always been a universal human understanding. The conjugal view of marriage is the only view that explains why government has an interest in regulating marriage in the first place: because it’s the only type of union that produces a child. 

This type of relationship is unique among all others, and society rightly sees the need to bind fathers to mothers formally, in order to secure and promote a stable environment in which to rear and educate children born from their union. 

When people think that marriage is simply 'relational" (for companionship)  or romantic love, they have a hard time understanding why companionship and romance between same-sex couples should not be recognized as a marriage. They also don’t understand why sex should be saved for marriage when marriage is just about a fuzzy concept of “love” rather than a one-flesh union that is ordered to result in a child.

However, when we recognize that only a man and woman can form the “one-flesh” bodily union of marriage, any relationship that lacks this element, no matter how dedicated or caring it may be, is not a marriage.

The Catechism soars in its description of the vocation of men and women in marriage:

Conjugal love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter—appeal of the body and instinct, power of feeling and affectivity, aspiration of the spirit and of will. It aims at a deeply personal unity, a unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul; it demands indissolubility and faithfulness in definitive mutual giving; and it is open to fertility.

In brief, marriage is a state of life of high significance not only for the man and woman involved, but for the whole of society. It requires the giving of oneself totally to the other, and that is a challenge throughout life which purifies and strengthens the two who commit to becoming one. The gift of oneself raises each to to a true community of love and fidelity.

Such a vision of marriage is what the influencers should be promoting for the happiness of their followers and the benefit of society.

💖 Made This Way, Leila Miller and Trent Horn, Catholic Answers Press, California, 2018.

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Created with a purpose and a personal call

Called out of our tombs

 Human dignity 

💢“What is it that is about to be created, that enjoys such honor? It is man—that great and wonderful living creature, more precious in the eyes of God than all other creatures! For him the heavens and the earth, the sea and all the rest of creation exist. God attached so much importance to his salvation that He did not spare his own Son for the sake of man. Nor does He ever cease to work, trying every possible means, until He has raised man up to himself and made him sit at his right hand.”

— ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM (died 407)

💢 We are each of us, as Pope Benedict XVI (died December 2022) famously said, “not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.” 

“Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary,” Benedict reminded us. My grandmother is still willed and loved and necessary today, no more or less than my 1-year-old daughter. 

— The Pillar July 22, 2023

💢 It is important to realise that being a follower of Christ is intended to be a source of deep happiness and a realisation that one is truly fortunate to have discovered this vision of life. The happiness comes, even in a time of difficulty, from our close relationship with God, and a lifestyle that corresponds with how God made us. 

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Social norms thrown out in godless society - we suffer as 'don't-tell-me-what-to-do-itis' takes over

Augusto Del Noce (died 1989) was an Italian philosopher and political thinker. Regarded as one of the preeminent political thinkers and philosophers after the Second World War, he described the sexual revolution as the essence of the “Occidentalist heresy,” the radical abolition of the sacred. After that abolition, there is no objective, cosmic order of truth to which individual behavior and social norms and institutions must conform.

We can see this loss of orienation being borne out in the public disorder in Western cities with the young implicated in most instances, but also in the lack of the sense of the need to maintain self-control among older people, whether as aircraft passengers or, in the extreme cases the US often offers, in the shooting of annoying neighbours.

Stuart Heritage, writing in The Guardian, declares:

The last few weeks have seen a rash of headlines about a number of regrettable blow-ups that have occurred because people just can’t seem to remember the basic rules of cinema etiquette any more.

In Maidstone, a woman took her ticketless child into Barbie; an act that resulted in a stand-up, full-volume physical fight. A Brazilian Barbie screening ended with a similar brawl, apparently because a woman let her child watch YouTube throughout the movie. Nor is this confined to Barbie. In June, a fight broke out at a screening of The Little Mermaid in Florida, and in March the same thing happened in France at the end of Creed III. Meanwhile, Twitter is awash with tales of poor cinema etiquette, from talking during films to taking photos during films.

[...] as a regular cinemagoer myself, I’ve seen first-hand the lack of basic common sense that has trickled in over the last few months. 

While Heritage doesn't view the "chaos in the aisles" as a sign of civilisational upheaval that in fact it warrants, he does highlight how social norms have become massively degraded. His account signals the degree to which an expectation of consideration of others is low, as is that of self-restraint among those who feel offended :

They’re so used to twin-screening during films at home that it seems alien for them to not have their phones in their hands. They’re so used to talking through films at home that it seems unreasonable to be expected to remain silent in a cinema. And when this sort of behaviour meets a wall of people who have spent a considerable amount of money to just enjoy a film, of course violence is going to erupt.

It’s like [...] being on a standing room only train next to someone who has their backpack slung in an empty seat. Things are always going to kick off. 

This state of affairs ‒ the "of course" and "always" ‒ results from the lack of  our acknowledgement of  an"objective, cosmic order of truth to which individual behavior and social norms and institutions must conform," as cited above.

And there is more evidence that social norms are breaking down as the "self" takes precedence over the "social":

When Harry Styles was pelted with chicken nuggets while on stage at New York's Madison Square Gardens last summer, he took it in his stride. "Interesting approach," smiled Styles, who has also weathered kiwi fruits, Skittles and bunches of flowers while performing. But when a mystery object hit him in the eye at a concert in Vienna last weekend, he wasn't laughing but, rather, wincing in pain.

It was the latest in a string of incidents where audience members have hurled potentially dangerous objects at performers. Earlier this month Drake was hit on the arm by a flying phone. That came days after country singer Kelsea Ballerini was struck in the face with a bracelet. In May, Bebe Rexha was taken to hospital and needed multiple stitches after a phone hit her in the eye. A man, since charged with assault, told police he thought it "would be funny" to try and hit the singer. 

Bebe Rexha

It's not just live music seeing disruptive behaviour. In April, police were called to a performance of The Bodyguard musical in Manchester when rowdy audience members reacted with "unprecedented levels of violence" to staff. At other venues there has been everything from "heated arguments" to full-on brawls. And in the US, one fan's disruption of a Broadway play in December 2022 followed several other incidents of audience outbursts.

Across the cultural sphere, it feels like audiences are misbehaving. At a recent Las Vegas show, Adele weighed in, saying: "Have you noticed how people are like, forgetting … show etiquette at the moment? People just throwing shit on stage" – before warning fans not to try it with her.

The BBC report above adds that Dr Kirsty Sedgman, a senior lecturer in theatre at the University of Bristol who specialises in audience research, has book just out, On Being Unreasonable, which "explores widening divisions in society over how we use public space".

Dr Sedgman is quoted as saying that cultural spaces have always been places where spontaneous outbursts could be expected but after the Covid lockdown people are behaving with more abandon:

"I work with a lot of people throughout the cultural industries, and the message seems to be pretty much unanimous that since lockdown ended, the situation has fundamentally shifted."

That is borne out in a report by the UK's Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theatre Union, which found that 90% of theatre staff had witnessed bad behaviour – and 70% believed things had got worse since the pandemic.

"It's not all audiences by any means, but for a lot of people, there's a growing sense of what I call 'don't-tell-me-what-to-do-itis'," says Sedgman. She believes we're seeing a breakdown in social contracts – the behavioural norms and rules of engagements that keep us all ticking along together nicely.

People are thirsty for live entertainment again, but increasingly want it on their terms – especially when ticket prices are soaring. "People are coming with actively competing ideals about what they want that experience to be like," says Sedgman. "Some people want to not be disturbed by others chatting or eating or drinking, or have phones blocking their way. Other people want to maybe take a step backwards to the time when the arts were a more sociable experience. The difficulty is that those pleasures are irreconcilable." 

Meanwhile though, [Dr Sedgman] thinks recent incidents could be a bellwether for deeper issues. "Live performance has always been a laboratory space for figuring out what it means to be together," she explains. "Pretty much every time society goes through a big period of unrest, that unrest starts to ferment and explode in live performance first. Audiences are a kind of canary in the coal mine for much bigger frustrations and divisions starting to bubble over. It's important that we pay attention to what's happening in the cultural sphere. It's an indicator of what's happening to us as a society."

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Radical subjectivity fuels intolerance

Radical subjectivity for me but not for thee. It is an emblem of the moral confusions of the Woke Revolution that it is considered self-evident that one’s gender is determined exclusively by the imperatives of one’s own subjectivity but that one’s race is an immutable fact in whose determination subjectivity has no role to play whatsoever. Thus, the bedrock claim of gender identity politics that, say, one has never felt like a man but always like a woman and thus one is a woman, full stop, is something that decent people are expected to treat as a simple matter of fact, and unimpeachable as such in the context of trans.

But to say that one has never felt white but instead has always felt oneself to be black, Native American, etc., is to commit both a form of moral fraud and to inflict great psychological trauma and in many cases material harm on blacks or Native Americans, and as such should self-evidently — as self-evident of the authority of subjective regarding gender — always to be denounced and repudiated.

— Author and cultural observer David Rieff in his Desire and Fate Substack newsletter. See also this link on the trend of trying to change one's race based on the principles of gender ideology.

In like vein, writer Walter Kirn on the absurdities of the American cultural transformation. This from an interview in Palladium magazine:

If America is a story, then who better to diagnose its ills and prescribe a treatment than a novelist? Walter Kirn was born in 1962 in Ohio and grew up in Minnesota. After Princeton and Oxford he embarked on a literary career in New York media, reviewing books and writing for New York Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Time, The New Republic, and Harper’s.

Kirn’s 2001 novel Up in the Air was made into the critically-acclaimed 2009 film starring George Clooney. His memoir Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever chronicles his own adventure going from rural Minnesota to the Ivy League. Lately, he co-hosts the podcast America This Week and is the co-founder of County Highway, a new print magazine about America in the form of a nineteenth-century newspaper.

 And so to the interview:

There seems to be a growing chasm between the real-life experiences that people have and the grand narratives about our common story—about what we suppose is normal. How did we get here?  

I’m 60 years old. I went to grade school in Minnesota, in very small rural public schools. I was aware from maybe the fourth or fifth grade, through film strips and prepared lesson plans from textbook companies, that we lived in an endangered world. Outside of basic teaching, we were given the overriding message that we should be optimistic about things like computers and space, but there was a louder drumbeat about pollution, racial division, and the Cold War.

Because I was an ambitious kid who wanted to succeed in school, I was always attempting to discern the lesson behind the lesson. What I saw was that I was being asked to be very concerned and anxious about mankind’s stupidity and selfishness. That seemed to be the lesson underlying the pollution lectures—that people in their cars and their desire to have too many things were dirtying up the world.

The Cold War lesson was more sophisticated and went on even longer into junior high and high school. It centered on books like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and other depictions of the dangers of a totalitarian world. We were asked to congratulate ourselves as young Americans on our freedom and clarity and basic goodness compared to this lurking threat from the Soviet Union, in which the citizens were all forced to think alike, act alike, and be alike.

But a totalitarian-style political atmosphere has arisen, alarming this writer—artists and writers are usually the first they come for: 

Over the years, it has caused me great consternation that the heavy aversion to totalitarian, dictatorial, and top-down systems that was implanted in me is now kind of useless—and even dangerous. As I discern trends in our society that seem to resemble those I was warned against and raise my hand to say that I don’t like this, I’m told that, somehow, I’m out of step, I’m overly alarmed, and I’m maybe even on the wrong side.

But, I want to reply, this is only what a seventh-grade Minnesota public school student was taught to fear, taught to be on the lookout for, and now you’re telling me it constitutes some kind of dissident position to be afraid of these things?

Fashionable principles derived from a Marxist school of thought now beguile academia and, as a consequence, so too the graduates forming the elite of media, corporate and political life. The mentality abroad in society is reflected in the statistics that young people increasingly support the use of violence or direct protest to censor speakers (See here and here).

Kirn finds that the decline in acknowledgement of the virtues that maintain civility, and the aggressive nature of the new Critical Theory ideology in its forms of neo-racism and gender self-invention are taking their toll:

Since the fall of 2016, it has gotten worse and worse. More American institutions have been cast as dubious, unpatriotic, and perhaps manipulated from abroad. More American attitudes, whether they be religious, cultural, or even intellectual, have been redlined as dangerous. More individuals from citizens to media figures to authors and artists have been cast in the role of dangerous dissenters.

The sum total, to bring it right up to the present, is that we now live in an age of profound anxiety. The political emergency, the environmental threat, and later COVID, were all globbed together as one giant example of our need for vast controlling authority that would keep us from dying. No longer could the citizens be trusted to make their own decisions, associate freely, speak openly, and spontaneously carry out their lives. All the risks had risen to the ultimate level, DEFCON 1. Our communications had to be monitored—and even manicured. Politics was too dangerous to be left in the hands of the population. Very suddenly, on every front, there seemed to be a rationale for total control and also a scenario in which, should we fail to yield to that control, doom was certain.

The narrative from the elite is that "some nascent revolution [is] about to break out" where dissent arises— "... the fact that it is imputed so often has started to scare me".

In America today, if you are having experiences going about your day that run counter to the mega-narratives on the news and social media, you have a choice. Do you compare notes with other people? If you do, you have an instinctive sense that somehow you are endangering yourself. Because you’ve seen other people be mocked for it and examples made of famous figures who have stepped out of line.

Therefore, signalling adherence to the elite-approved virtues is in full play in most Western socieities, along with unquestioning submission to the subjective decrees of those trying to control the narrative. It's hard to stand firm against the powers of those in the commanding heights of society in light of the social sanctions they wield, and it cuts no ice to point out that questioning something doesn't make you phobic of that item.  

Still, Rieff and Kirn, by personally running against the tide of the cultural elite, encourage us to highlight the absurdities of the ideologies thrust upon us, and to stand firm in defence of reality.

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